Cheering parents and community members lined the path between Chattanooga Preparatory’s gym and main building Friday morning to celebrate students as they began the first day of school.
The all-boys charter school has hosted the event every year since its founding to welcome students, but on Friday, it marked a new milestone. For the first time, there was a senior class leading the procession.
“It means a lot because we get to go down in history,” senior Jaydan Parker said in an interview. “Everybody gets to see how far we came and all the achievements we’re going to have at the end of the year.”
In August 2018, Chattanooga Preparatory opened its doors with 66 sixth grade students. The number of students has grown each year as the school added new grade levels. With its expansion up to 12th grade complete, enrollment reached 580 students this year.
(READ MORE: Black retains seat, 4 Republican newcomers join Hamilton County school board)
The school was founded by Ted and Kelly Alling with the vision of recreating the success of Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy by forming a high-performing school for boys.
“We’ve been telling people along the way that we do more to achieve more,” Principal Diamond Kelley said in an interview. “This year, we get a chance to show that we’ve done more, and we are going to achieve more. These young men are going to do great, great things, and we’re super excited. We have 50 young men who are about to walk across the stage, and when they do, they will show how hard work pays off.”
As a public charter school, the school receives funding from state and local taxpayers but is privately managed. Hamilton County students can apply to attend the school, similar to the district’s school choice process.
CEO Brad Scott, who joined the school near the end of its first year, said watching the growth in the maturity, academic achievement and leadership of this year’s seniors has been incredible.
“They were the inaugural class that started our football team,” he said in an interview. “They were the inaugural class that started our basketball team. They were the inaugural class that started taking AP classes, so they had a lot of firsts, and they persevered through it.”
Photo Gallery
School leaders, students reflect as Chattanooga Preparatory’s founding class begins senior year
(READ MORE: Chattanooga Prep ends city’s boys’ basketball state title drought)
Each part of the curriculum from financial literacy classes to college visits has been geared toward the school’s motto, building the men of tomorrow, Scott said.
Chattanooga Preparatory offers 16 Advanced Placement classes, which every student takes. Starting this spring, the school will also offer dual enrollment credit in partnership with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and CGLA, Scott said.
On Friday morning, school leaders also held a ribbon-cutting for the school’s newest building, which contains a cafeteria, as well as additional classroom space that will be used by the senior class. Previously, students ate meals in their classrooms.
“It is happiness,” Kelley said. “It’s sadness. It’s a lot of emotions mixed up in one. To get a chance to see my seniors get what they’ve asked for, which was a cafeteria. It’s what they deserve. They work really hard. We have some really high scholars. We have kids thinking about what schools they want to go to next year. It just happened really quickly. We thought we had forever and now it’s over.”
Senior Gueller Gonzales said Friday was a reminder of the number of people who had been supporting him and his classmates since the beginning.
“This is the conclusion of an experiment,” he said in an interview. “This was really all an experiment from the beginning, and it just goes to show that even though we may come from maybe impoverished backgrounds or maybe not from middle-class families, that we can still use our brain power and go above and beyond.”
Contact Shannon Coan at scoan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6396.